119 ~ My favorite things, Part 2

These couple of posts are a riff on some favorite tools, my favorite utilitarian objects - all low tech (yet highly functional). This next one is the final step in making pancakes from the corn I grow, and is my oldest non-human friend: my Casco electric griddle. A flat of steel, with nothing to move except a cord into an outlet. I first made pancakes on it at my father's elbow in about 1962, and I've been flapping jacks on it ever since. My family might have already purchased the griddle in the 1950s before I was born. 

More than six decades of pancakes and counting - buckwheat, blueberry, "dollar cakes" (as my dad called them - miniature pancakes to use up the last of the batter, about the size of silver dollars), and lately cornmeal. The griddle has done its job for about as long as I've been alive (or more), without a single screen freeze or error message (try that, Android).

This is a friend that dependably nourishes both body and heart each time I plug it in, and listen to its gentle hum as it begins to warm. A hum of pleasure and constancy.

            So please, come sit at my table, we'll turn off our phones, and I'll feed us cornmeal pancakes with maple syrup. Nothing else is needed in the world.

“There is no greatness where simplicity, goodness and truth are absent.”   - Leo Tolstoy

 Some upcoming “Bird in the Bush” events - please join me!:

March 7 at 7:00 pm, Arcadia Books in Spring Green (a free event): I’ll read from my forthcoming book on Saola conservation (see more here), in conjunction with award-winning Hmong-American poet Mai Der Vang, who will read from her newest collection, Primordial, about the Saola.

Please come out and welcome Mai Der to Wisconsin!

March 8, 1-4 pm, here at the farmhouse: Join me to learn to make maple syrup (for pancakes, natch). The workshop is offered through Folklore Village, and for more information, and to register, click here (and hope your click works…).

May 17-18, also here at the farmhouse: Advance (or start) your skills in reading wildlife tracks & signs with expert tracker Matt Nelson (and maybe find a morel or two along the way). This workshop is also offered through Folklore Village, and you can find more information here.

We’ll have some rich fun at any and all of these events, and I hope you can join in.